Submissions to this series are still open until Nov. 1st.]

–

The cement trough yawns, an abyss filled with streaming sewage hundreds of feet below. The smell is pungent as wastewater from streams and rivers mixes with household waste to create a haven for the bacterium that is my nemesis: Chlamydia.

“You know what’s in the sewage?” asks the beefy engineer at the Woodward Avenue water purification plant in Hamilton, a small city in Ontario once famous for its steel. These days, it is more known for its non-achievements: steel mill layoffs; Ti-Cats football fans who shout “Oskie-Wee-Wee! Oskie-Wa-Wa! Holy mackinaw! Tigers…ha! Ha! Ha!” even as their team repeatedly loses; and an underdeveloped downtown core with an overdeveloped pigeon problem.

But Hamilton is also a city of waterfalls and streams, rivers and harbors, all a natural home for Chlamydia. As, of course, is sewage.

“Corn,” the engineer answers himself. “Corn doesn’t get digested. It passes through the intestine intact.”

He hands me five litres of waste water.

Under a darkening sky, I drive back to my research laboratory at the McMaster University hospital and lug the jugs of water upstairs, past the red zone where just-born infants rest peacefully in plastic incubator cages, under individual yellow bulbs.

Rather like plants.

Children are at great risk of infection by Chlamydophila pneumoniae, which causes pneumonia. Its infamous cousin Chlamydia trachomatis causes the sexually transmitted disease Chlamydia, which can result in blindness. Prachlamydia and Simkania cause respiratory illness. Waddlia causes abortion in cows.

I run through the list, memorized for my upcoming thesis defense. The next sentence in the presentation goes so:

New species of the bacterium are still being found, in places as far-flung and extreme as Antarctic salinity lakes. Wherever they are found, they are pathogenic. And yet, their presence in our environment, in our water sources — rivers, ponds, and lakes — has been largely ignored.

My job is to figure out a way to detect them that lab technicians can employ easily; an amazingly difficult task, I’ve found out over the past four months. I have trudged through forests and swamps and man-made reservoirs located next to deserted hiking trails and country roads and highways. I have watched the Red Hill Expressway, intended to cut travel time between Hamilton and Toronto in half, grow from a muddy road to a cement monster, all the while collecting water from the Red Hill Creek. The different water sources each have distinctive fauna and flora that comes to life under a microscope.

A single drop of water is a universe unto itself, inhabited by creatures of reduced proportions. Magical shapes drift in and out under 40 times magnification — translucent amoebas, paramecia, rotifers, sun animalcules (“little animal”) with hair-like flagellum around them like a halo, and other strangely beautiful blobs. These are the visible creatures.

My target is the inhabitant of a world of less than a single micrometer — invisible.

Invisible is how I feel as I pass into the purple zone of the hospital. Fluorescent bulbs cast shadows in the deserted hallway. Graduate students have fled their labs to quell their boredom with alcoholic beverages. I am alone in my quest for what I have come to view as an ethereal creature. It exists, but has eluded me repeatedly. I do not know if this is because of human error, or because the water samples lack Chlamydia. I do not know which answer I would prefer.

So filtering sewage is what it comes down to.

–

Every day for the past four months I have performed the same set of experiments.

One. Collect sample. Spin sample in a centrifuge at 500 times the speed of gravity. This weighs down all the debris to be thrown away.

Two. Take the “soup” — the resulting sample — and filter using paper with pore size of 1000 micrometers under strong vacuum. This gets rid of the biggest microorganisms.

Three. Filter through a paper with one micrometer-sized pores. Now, only the smallest organisms – smaller than 0.000 001th the size of a centimeter – are left in the sample.

Four. Add phenol and chloroform, chemicals that will cause the beautiful, mysterious living blobs to burst open, spilling out their contents — DNA and RNA — into the sample.

Five. Amplify regions of DNA where the four bases — adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine — have come together in a sequence that, out of all the organisms in the world, are present only in the Chlamydial genome. The sequence is a signature as unique as a thumbprint, which, after many steps inside the nucleus of the bacterium, results in the “signature protein” CT429. No one knows the function of this protein, one of the thousands that allow these bacteria to grow and multiply and infect. A PCR machine is used for this.

Six. Amplify the sequence coding for Heat shock protein 70, a protein present in most organisms on Earth. It helps fold other proteins into shapes that must be painfully conserved for proper function. Misfolded proteins can result in disease — dementia and Lou Gherig’s, for example.

This is the so-called “control.” Experiments cannot proceed in science without a standard to show results are possible. That way, you can’t blame the machine when nothing comes out the other end.

Seven. Separate amplified DNA fragments according to size and charge.

If the heat shock protein gene (“control”) amplifies but the Chlamydia gene doesn’t, it means the sewage water contained organisms of many varieties, but not Chlamydia.

Or it could mean that there is a glitch in the filtration steps, or other parts of the experiment.

This uncertainty is ever present in the lab, I have found. Why did something not work? Or why did something work? Was the result an outlier? Could it be possible that the wrong protein got amplified in the PCR machine due to primer mismatch? Perhaps the AGTCCCT primer, instead of attaching to TCAGGGA, attached to a region of the DNA that goes TCATGGA. Now the wrong region is amplified, a size of 600 base pairs instead of the 400 base pairs that I am expecting. Nothing makes sense.

Or perhaps, serendipitously, the wrong region is also 400 base pairs long, creating the illusion of the perfect match. Voila! The protein is found! Chlamydia exists!

But clone the region into a vector and re-amplify. Sequence. The protein sequence is not the same as for CT429. The wrong protein got amplified. Chlamydia doesn’t exist.

–

I pour the sewage into 1000 ml centrifugation bottles. The lab vibrates as the ancient machine spins. I bounce slightly on my toes in rhythm with the rocking cultures of bacteria grown by my colleagues.

This is a world of objectivity, ruled by the twin gods of precision and accuracy. But like life itself, the world of experimentation has uncertainties, with results true to perhaps a 90th percentile of certainty, or even a 95th. There are no final answers. But there is the quest.

There are more of these pieces on the way, but if you enjoy this one even half as much as we did, then we have already achieved our goal.]

–

As an aging academic neurosurgeon I confront many emotionally draining life-and-death issues with patients, and intellectually challenging ones with peers and students. A few years ago I even studied as a mature student to achieve a masters of health science in bioethics, to help me grapple with some of the tough dilemmas I face every day. I learned from many great teachers and thinkers about the theological, philosophical, and legal hand-rails that exist to help guide us up and down the staircase of morality.

I was reintroduced to old friends like Kant, who possessed the courage and goodness to espouse that we should do the right thing out of a sense of obligation to do the right thing and for no other reason. And to Mill and others who appealed to the practical among us by espousing a utilitarian approach in which the most moral course of action is the one which produces the most desirable outcome for the greatest number of people. And who could leave Rawls out of this deliberation – he whose intense sense of justice and fairness and ingenious concept of the veil of ignorance literally brings a tear to my eye every time I think of it.

Of course we also have the good old principles of ethics to guide us as well – they are deliciously simplistic, something which appeals to a dumb brain surgeon like me.

But in spite of all this exposure to brilliant bioethical theory, principle, and practice, I have failed to unravel many of the mysteries surrounding life’s everyday problems. One which haunts me, as a surgeon and a Kantian, is the correct etiquette around flatulating (hereafter referred to as “farting”) in a closed space like the operating room (OR) where many people and their noses are within a confined physical space.

I’m a fairly flatulent guy, and like most men, I’m not shy about it – in fact I’m pretty proud of it. It subserves a necessary bodily function, but it is also inherently funny and always makes me laugh, no matter where I am or what I am doing. I have never encountered a single fart that wasn’t humorous. So I never shy away from an accusation that I have let one loose. For example, at home I never blame my dogs when one of my daughters fans her hand in disgust in front of her face, grimacing and glaring at me while uttering an irritated “Oh, daddy!” In fact I have even been known to take credit when one of my dogs farts – they don’t appear to mind me stealing their thunder.

But what is one to do when one needs to fart in the OR?

First, let us be clear: farting is not an optional activity which an ethical person could consciously and morally choose to avoid if she/he wished, in the same way an ethical person could avoid cheating, stealing, lying, or murdering. With that obvious but essential fact out in the open, let us proceed. I have thought hard about the various approaches one can take in the face of an impending fart, and as I see it there are finite options when a surgeon in the heat of battle has to let one fly.

1)    He/she can do the old “bun-squeeze” and hope the urge passes (as opposed to the gas!) but this is uncomfortable and undoubtedly bad for one’s colonic health;

2)    If its at a non-crucial part of the operation he/she can walk over to the corner for a few minutes, perhaps under the guise of needing to review the imaging studies on the computer screen. That way the evil gasses are deposited at least at some distance from the center of the action;

3)    He/she can let it fly and pretend nothing happened;

4)    He/she can let it fly and blame it on a nurse or resident doctor, or maybe the “gas-passer” (i.e. the anesthetist);

5)    He/she can let it fly but take full responsibility either before or after the event.

I have personally always opted for option #5 and I consistently make sure to announce the eruption before it happens. I feel this is the most courteous and morally desirable course of action because it not only represents honest and open disclosure of what is viewed by many as an unpleasant act, but it has the practical advantage of allowing certain people to take evasive action –the circulating nurse, anesthetist, and on-lookers. The scrub nurse and my surgical assistants are pretty well locked in and must tough it out and face the music (even if it’s a silent one).

Overall, though, this course of action would seem to satisfy Kantian ethics by doing what is clearly the right thing irrespective of outcome. And it seems to be aligned with Utilitarian ethical theory by producing the best outcome for the largest number of people. Finally, I don’t know exactly how Rawls would view this analysis but I think he would be satisfied.

It feels good to put my graduate training in bioethics to such important use.

We’re a small publication with only three editors, all of whom are currently scattered across the country/globe. At the moment there is only one of us handling most, if not all, of the magazine’s operations, from correspondance to the organization and tracking of submissions to event planning and social media stuff. As the IQ grows in both size and ambition, we’re more and more in need of someone to help us function on a day-to-day basis.

Responsibilities will definitely include: Correspondence (helping us make sure all queries/emails are answered and that all submissions recieved are acknowledged and personally responded to), organization and tracking of individual submissions, helping us maintain our social media presence and email list, and assisting with the planning, organization and promotion of events.

We may also need your help from time with basic web stuff such as site maintenance and content uploading, as well as helping us proofread each issue before it goes out into the world.

Assistants will also, if they wish, be included in discussions and decisions about possible new themes, directions and features for the magazine. This is a chance to not only gain experience in publishing, but to become directly involved in the development of one of Canada’s most interesting and innovative young literary magazines.

We are not gonna lie: This is a job that will, at times, be a little boring and tedious-feeling. There will be a lot of answering of emails, a lot of making of spreadsheets. But it will also, at other times, be a job that is extremely fun, creative, exciting and rewarding. We can say this with some confidence, as we’ve been doing it ourselves for over a year. It is also a job you can do from the comfort of your own home. We will never ask you to get coffee or go to the post office, the hours we will ask you to put in will be very few compared to most intern- or assistanceships, and every time we see you in real life we will give you hugs and beer.

Hours will be roughly 2-4 a week in the months when we are not actually putting out an issue, and 5-10 a week when we are. Pay is (extremely) modest, but it exists.

Our ideal candidate is Toronto or Montreal-based (though we will accept submissions from anywhere in Canada), with some kind of literary or publishing background. Applicants should be organized, enthusiastic, and really really good at replying promptly to emails. Previous experience is helpful but by no means required – it only matters that you can demonstrate that you’ve got the skills and enthusiasm we’re looking for.

Please have a look through our mandate and editorial policies before you send us your resume.

Applicants should send a resume, a brief cover letter and their contact information to incongruousquarterly@gmail.com. Please be sure to include your full name and “Editorial Assistant Application” in the subject heading.

Thanks so much, and good luck!

Love,

IQ

The deadline for submissions is November 13^th, 2011.

Poems, fiction and art can be considered “unpublishable” for reasons like content, length, form and subject matter. But what about work that cannot be published in a print magazine? Where does it fit, and how?

We are seeking literary and artistic work that takes into account, and advantage of, the fact that we are an online publication rather than a printed one.

We’re interested in figuring out what we can offer our contributors and readers that a print publication might not be able to. We are not bound by concerns of page or word count; we can feature audio and video files, hyperlinks, any kind of image, downloadable files, interactive or collaborative works, as well as our usual, more basic format of simple text or image on a page. We love work that explores, exploits or messes with different media and the boundaries between them is awesome; work that doesn’t do any of that stuff (more “traditional” stories and poems) but is concerned with the same ideas or themes we’re interested in (innovation, communication, connection, alienation, etc.) is great too.

Above all, we are looking to learn things. Surprise us. Challenge us. Show us something new.

Fiction submissions should be sent to incongruousfiction@gmail.com
Poetry submissions should be sent to incongruouspoetry@gmail.com
Submissions of art, or queries of any kind, should be sent to incongruousquarterly@gmail.com

Love,

IQ

www.incongruousquarterly.com/submissions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE

1: Have you seen our new issue yet? It is over here and science-themed and we think you are going to like it. We had it guest-edited by two amazing writers, Jon Paul Fiorentino and Elizabeth Bachinsky, and designed by the frightening talented Karen Correia da Silva. As if that weren’t enough, it features work by some equally talented ladies and gentlemen:

Amanda Ackerman
Gary Barwin
Jessica Rose Marcotte
Melissa Bull
Heather Davidson
Mat Laporte
Kent MacCarter
Michael Nardone
& Daniel Zomparelli

2: I know, right? PLUS, we’re also going to be posting a new science-themed nonfiction essay by a different author every week-ish on our blog. Can you believe it?  (We can.)

2.5: We are, by the way, continuing to accept submissions of incongruously science-themed nonfiction essays for THAT VERY SECTION over the course of the next few months – check our submissions page for details.

3: Do you like fun? Summertime? Friendship? Montreal? Amazing literature? Gifted people reading their amazing literary work in front of you because of fun and friendship and love and summertime? Do you like to have your face melted off (in a relatively low-fi way) by  awesome young musical upstarts?  OF COURSE YOU DO. You’re not a monster, you’re a human being. And we know that. That’s why we are having a launch party for this issue in Montreal on August 15^th that’s going to feature readings from Issue #3 contributors, including Melissa Bull, Heather Davidson and Michael Nardone, and musical performances from your new best friends, Lowlands and Alanna Gurr. Summer’s not over yet – come out, drink some beers, make some friends, fall in love, beat us at drunk scrabble, etc. etc. etc. (Kidding! You’ll never be able to beat us at scrabble! But you can try.)

You can RSVP to the event on facebook, or find the details here. See you soon? (See you soon!)

4: AND, somehow, that’s not even all. We’re going to be posting our new call for submissions, plus some very exciting, can’t-miss-type news about upcoming issues, sometime in the next week; check back here, follow us on facebook or twitter, or sign up for our newsletter to stay apprised.

Have a good summer, stay cool and be good.

Love,

IQ

Okay. So you’re at a bar, right? (I know. Just stick with me.) And you’re drinking a beer and you’re talking, or being talked to, and someone you sort of know (being polite) is like, What’s the theme for the next issue of your online literary magazine going to be? And you (less polite) are like, Oh man, let me tell you ALL about it, it’s going to be AWESOME, get ready, and then oh no wait sorry hang on that’s not it, you’re actually in a café, with a friend, and they ask you, wait no. You’re in class. You’re at a stranger’s birthday party. You’re at home or you’re boarding a bus, you’re at a high school reunion, you’re on the phone with the other two people who edit your online literary magazine, you’re in a car with your mother. Or something. You are somewhere, and asked what your new theme is, and you’re like, Oh boy, get ready:

SCIENCE.

That’s it, you guys. It’s going to be great. We are, with our youthful enthusiasm and unique editorial mandate and fresh perspective and boundless reserves of energy etc. etc. etc. going to take this theme that seems at once incredibly broad and far too specific and name the shit out of it, pace out the strange liminal border that separates art and science, find the unique and strange secret places where they overlap, dissolve the difference, we are going to confuse these two things in a way that is entirely unlike anything any literary magazine has ever done before, because that is just what we do.

And the friend, the stranger, the bus driver, your high school chemistry teacher, co-editors, family, your best friend, your readers, don’t look at you, and are like:

Okay? Good luck with that?

Because all of them already know something you don’t.

So you start working on the issue, calling, receiving, making plans, doing research. But  the more you do your work the more the thing, that thing you didn’t know, begins to reveal itself.

It is this: You are doing it wrong.

Science and art, it turns out, don’t really need you to tell them about the places where science and art intersect; this territory wasn’t just discovered and named and quartered off decades before you and your laptop showed up – it is being explored and built upon even as we speak, by people with boundless intelligence and enthusiasm and skill and weird courage. There are better things for you to do than try and force science and art against each other, because the world, every day, is doing that for and around you. Your job, it turns out, is maybe just to make room for these things to interact, and to watch how they work, and to learn, and to listen, and read.

So okay. So you try it again.

–

This is our third issue. It took us a while to make.

There are poems, and stories, and every week or so we are going to post a nonfiction piece on a scientific subject by a different writer on our blog. We will have a new call for submissions soon, and some good news, and a party.

Thank you for your patience, your kindness, and – always – for reading.

Love,

Dermis tears shabby scabs
stems stake
prussian blue crimson black.
Heliotropic as spyrogira flags
they stalk.
Bodies are water.

The itch to spawn broods.
Brooding spews filaments.
Name the fibres.
Let the fibres name themselves.
Ariadne after Ariadne after Ariadne
spool synapse succour.
Spores ganglion implant. Bleed
branches.
Bodies are water.

Entire generations knit
renting flesh.
Strands reel unheimliched.
Swaddled between the dermal layers of mica
winds the family: the true nuclei.

You carry your own kit, sinew wrapped

and held down by veined cords. Its use, you

learned from snakes. Who define loneliness,

mouths on their tails like they really are complete

that way. Now you know what they reach for,

how a reptile like that can survive hunger

by digesting parts of its own heart muscle.

And later, they grow it back. You do not need

this explained to you. Absurd on a Monday night

to look so hungry, red throat stretching open

like a carpet no one will walk down.

Percentage likelihood that Captain Hook is named after Robert Hooke (because C. Hook is afraid of clocks and Hooke invented the watch spring):
>1%

Percentage of people who think that this is a cooler explanation than “because Captain Hook has a hook for a hand”:

33%

Number of jerks named Isaac Newton that it takes to destroy your portrait when they become president of the Royal Society and your name is Robert Hooke:
1

Percentage likelihood that Robert Boyle’s air pump was actually designed by Hooke:
90%

Number of times that a design flaw in one of his own devices saved Robert Hooke’s life:
1

Number of times that Robert Hooke climbed into a man-sized air pump to see what would happen when they took out all the air:
1

Robert Hooke’s description of the side effects of being inside a giant vacuated fishbowl:
It’s like having a hangover.

Chances that he actually did it on a bet:
Pretty good.

Cause of Francis Bacon’s death:
Catching a chill after rolling around in the snow naked to see if it was a good antiseptic.

Robert Hooke’s hero:
Francis Bacon.

Definition of a fact as established by the Royal Society:
If enough gentlemen agree upon something, it is a fact.

Chances that a sizar at Oxford University would be considered a member of the gentry:
Poor.

Percentage chance that Robert Hooke was a sizar at Oxford University:
100%

Approx. number of chips discovered on Robert Hooke’s shoulder upon his death:
2-3

What Robert Hooke said about the eyes of a fly under a microscope:

“The Eyes of a Fly in one kind of light

appear almost like a Lattice, drilled through

with abundance of small holes…

In the Sunshine they look like a Surface

cover’d with golden Nails;

in another posture like a Surface

cover’d with Pyramids;

in another with Cones . . .

a Small Ball of Quick-silver . . . ”

For simple stilts, wooden shutters, bamboo stools and teepee screen
how fucking went down in the ‘30s. Or before, on islands
inanimation tremors peel off totemic poles, careen
as headless seamen in a storm of scold and reprimands . . .

Shake to quake then thunder, the inert aerobically revert
to wormhole seer. Hubbub. A conduit through which they download
futures, Nappy San and moonshine frantic by tripped energy . . .

And The Joy of Sex in PDF. An exegesis rort
of nested calcs that sum where gelatinous dynamics goad
get born, get found, you Einsteins, in slipstreams of modernity